Let's just think about what Donald Trump recently did. He wooed Putin and tried to stitch the US and Russia together without knowing the difference between Great Britain, England and the United Kingdom.

Humanity is supposed to have progressed. A Harvard University professor, Steven Pinker, argues in favour of it in his new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. On maximum standards of well-being, we are apparently faring way better than we did ever before.

Most of us want to live forever. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, hopes to live to be 120. Dmitry Itskov, the Russian internet billionaire, aspires to live to 10,000. Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, finds the end of life “incomprehensible,” while Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, hopes to “cure” it.